Saturday, September 29, 2012

Let It Begin: More Piracy Discourse, Less Brutal Rudeness [EDITED]

Behold, the Swarm.

If you're going to discuss piracy, then
there are a few things I want you to understand. The first is that
while the conventional wisdom is that piracy amounts to nothing more
than theft, it actually represents a much more complex series of
actions and subsequent reactions. I'm going to stick to recent events
to correlate these facts for you, so that we duck discussing
proto-capitalists boarding and taking over ships centuries ago.

In recent years, piracy has
occurred due to increasing technology and industry's decreased
ability, or at the very least their denial of that technology, to
take advantage of that sudden change.

Example A.: The MP3.

The MP3 is part of a long
series of innovations in music technology that largely went
unnoticed until the force of its appearance was pretty much forced
the record industry of today to take notice. It's history is very
interesting, and very telling:

The MPEG format was very clunky, like
other digital music formats, and only terribly useful for adding
digital tracks to movies prior to around 1998, when the first series
of digital musical devices began hitting the market. I was actually
in middle school around this time, and I still recall listening to my
first MP3 between 1998-1999. What the biggest change to the format
that the third generation of the series added was the ability to
compress the size of the given music file without losing too much
sound quality. These two things pretty much meant that digital music
was forth-coming, whether or not anyone noticed them.

Initially, at least prior to the
release of the first generation of iTunes software, MP3s were
actually a pain in the ass to accumulate. The architecture to pirate
them hadn't become all but ubiquitous, and therefore the individual
who wanted a massive selection of digital music on hand would have to
“rip” their CD collection one at a time. Some of the earliest MP3
encoding software could be best described as crap. Sometimes you'd
rip a CD and find that your music track skipped too much because you
didn't have enough RAM to encode a high quality product, etc, etc,
etc. It was very annoying, and prior to P2P software there were more
MIDI tracks on the internet than there were MP3s.

Napster changed that, by attempting to
market the then newly arrived P2P software to create the “biggest
music library on earth.” All went fairly well until Metallica and
other bands/musicians discovered people were sharing their music. At
which point P2P software mainstreamed, and a culture war emerged.

We will return to this later with my
second point.

Example B.: Ebooks.

Electronic books have actually been
around for a very long time. In fact, they follow a pattern of
emergence right along side the internet as we know it today. Some of
the first ebooks were released in the 1980s and 1990s, and hypertext
files constituting a book have been around for just as long. They
were not expressely popular except amongst geeks, or computer nerds,
and thus they largely escaped notice except in some circles. Around
1998 certain libraries began stocking them for free.

Several things were happening at once
at this time to keep in mind: first, printer and scanner technology
(“digital photography and digital printing” if you will) was
increasing at a fairly exponential rate, but not enough to gain
notice right away. Second, Adobe and other companies (not to mention
freeware programmers) were releasing programs like the Acrobat
reader to allow for easier ebook reading (amongst other
capabilities), and the PDF was heading on its way to emerge as the #1
used format. Third, almost all major traditional publishers that I'm
aware of were doing their best to avoid the market and stick by what
they knew best. You cannot entirely blame them.

The
PDF actually emerged by 1993, but interest in it doesn't seem to have
peaked – at least to me – until around the 2000s. By around 2006,
publishers in the occult industry could have begun cornering the
market on the files if they had just paid attention to what small
cabals of occultists were doing. Namely? Sharing hard to find,
extremely rare, almost impossible to buy limited edition runs of
books in that format.

P2P
software again emerged, allowing for even easier sharing of files too
large to email. By 2006 it was already becoming relatively cheap to
buy a scanner and scan one's favorite, almost impossible to find,
books and give them to friends. These things didn't just appear out
of the blue, is what I'm basically saying. Demand for them was
increasing and those demands were pretty much ignored until around
the emergence of the Kindle... At which point half my friends told me
that they were selling their libraries and just keeping ebook
archives.

The
failure of traditional markets to meet the demands of new technology
and move with them, along with those markets demand to simply “stop
piracy” actually increased the efficiency of that technology.

Napster
was closed down, and the lawsuits that occurred as this happened
taught “information pirates” lessons that they took to heart. The
first was that a centralized network of peers was not only easy to
shut down, but also allowed for individuals to sued for
downloading a song like “Happy Birthday” to play at someone's
birthday.

As
such a new form of decentralized network began to emerge, the
resultant sum of which is the Torrent. Torrent technology actually
solves several problems at once: first, it allows for a decentralized
network of peers to share files (whether legitimately gained or
illigimately gained). Second, it over comes the “whole-file-peer-to-peer”
basis of the first wave of P2P file sharing. By sharing “bits”
rather than whole files, the files can be downloaded at a much, much
faster rate than was seen with Napster. Where once an Ebook or even
an MP3 could take half an hour to hours to get, now this rate could
be cut far beyond “in half”. In short: it's now very easy to
download a large number of files quickly, and broadband connections
have made this even faster. It's hard to argue with how the Torrent
system of peers in a swarm works. It's actually nothing short of
brilliant, but so far no one but pirates are seriously
making use of it. This is very saddening to see.

Had
the RIAA and others jumped on the MP3/Digital music market faster,
they would have secured a place and eased the reasons that pirates
first turned to each other, which was to share music they'd bought
and taken time to painstaking “rip” into their libraries.
Instead, they did precisely the opposite and made just about every
geek on the internet increasingly infuriated. The lawsuits which
came of this resulted in better technology, more people using it, and
drastic losses in profits whereas initially there were gains (albiet
ignored).

The
best example is Metallica's S&M,
one of the albums that launched the culture war I'm currently
discusing. S&M was
actually selling better than previous albums the band made when they
began raving about piracy and losses. Why? The answer is one which
will repeat itself in a moment: people shared the music, liked it,
and bought it despite the “conventional wisdom” regarding piracy
and losses.

Of all the companies to take advantage of this, the first one to cross their t's and dot their i's was Apple with the iTunes market... Which has made them massive bank, despite the belief that digital music would never sell that was encountered prior to their emergence. Who would you rather be right now, the RIAA or Apple?

The
MPAA shares a sordid history with the RIAA when it comes to this
discussion. There emerged in the 2000s the DIVX (freeware = XVID)
file format, which allowed for high quality digital reproduction of
films and high quality sound reproduction (often using MPEG audio
formats). Demand began emerging for these files which was ignored,
and they spread across Napster (and later torrent and other systems)
like wildfire. Rather than acknowledge this and corner a market, the
industry again sought legal methods of suppression. I've already
discussed those results several times. This same technology would
come to be used for “fan favorite” T.V. Shows (I admit to
downloading plenty of Invader Zim
as a teenager).

The
conventional wisdom again concluded that this was nothing more than
theft, and for suppression. Enter Mark
Pesce and the Battlestar Galactica aspects. As he points out,
Battlestar Galactica's initial first episode was leaked to the pirate
crowd, largely composed of computer nerds and geeks, and the result
of this incident was... Well,
it was actually damn good ratings. This situation repeated itself
with the emergence of the new Dr. Who
series...

Which, despite being pirated,
ended up with some of highest ratings for the show at that
time.

Go
back and re-read those words if you're shocked or suffering from
cognitive bias. Hell, let me repeat it painfully slowly.

Some. Of. The. Highest. Ratings. For. The Show. At.
That. Time.*

These
shows didn't just do well: they went on to do very,
very well. Why? Pesce
proposes this is because Geeks love to talk to each other about Geek
things and recommend them. Plenty probably downloaded the episodes.
Plenty more waited and watched with baited breathe. Battlestar
Galactica went on to be one of the best rated shows that the then
SciFi Channel had, and Dr. Who continues to remain running strong.

This,
despite piracy. Perhaps even fueled in part due to it.

Is a
pattern emerging to you? Suppress the right to share files and people
will evolve even greater and harder to stop sharing architectures.
Furthermore, they will pirate more and more and buy less and less.
Leave those same individuals alone and they will speak of you
gloriously, if you give them a decent product, and tell their friends
to read/listen/watch/buy your product.

In
short? Alienate a group of people and call them nothing but thieves
and they will be sure to remember that, and remember that you're out
to get them. Leave them alone and let them market for you, and they
just might turn around and make some of your wildest dreams come
true.

There
is an emerging need to balance these two poles in the occult
community. Very few people have done it, and fewer have tried to be
experimental until they've been more or less forced to consider it. But we do need new forms of
experimentation, both with emerging technologies and the way we see
the industries.

But
who on earth will do that? Well, I suppose it's left to those of us
who aren't so old that we think nothing ever changes, and shaking
fingers at people will get anything, at all
done. Except ensure more losses and far, far more hostility.

Be
seeing you,

Jack Faust.

PS. I can link the shit out of this
stuff if you ask me. I've just rehashed what's actually in my head
from many, many, many long years of reading – from my teens to this
point.

PPS. Think of this as my way of apologizing for being an asshole to a vast amount of people, in large part due to seeing the same crap happen all over again. I should have known better. I fucked up. I'm sorry for being such a rampant dick. Except to that one guy. He really seemed to want my angry response.

*EDIT: Initially I said that it lead to the highest ratings on TV at the time. That is wrong. The ratings were still hiiiiigh. 10.81 million viewers high.

5 comments:

I have heard a few occult writers threaten to quit writing public material because of piracy. Personally, I just do not see piracy going away--the technology exists. Therefore, I am hoping to figure out how to get piracy to work for me.

Piracy and the struggle against it is just an extension of a natural process seen in nature, as well as all of human history. Basically something creates a good (something desired or needed), like a plant makes calories from sunlight, or an animal makes and enriches its blood from its food, or an Indian mines gold, or an author writes a book. It's not that the plant made sunlight, or the animal made the food, or the Indian made gold, or the author didn't get their ideas, thoughts, experiences from another teacher or god or spirit or tradition. It's just that the plant or animal or Indian or author added their own hard work to transform the sunlight, food, rock, and knowledge into a "good" desired by another. In those cases, a cow comes along and wants the energy so it eats the plant, killing it and stealing the sunlight. A parasite lives in the animal's digestive tract and extracts the blood for the nutrition from the bloodstream. The conquistador comes along and enslaves or kills the Indian and takes the gold. The kid comes along and rips the book or movie or music into a digital format and steals revenue from the author.

It's been this way since before there were human beings. The problem for, let's use the parasite in this case, is, how does one extract the good without destroying the host or enfeebling it so you get diminishing returns? How do you get the golden egg without killing the goose? The "best" parasites are the ones that actually provide some kind of "kickback" to the host, perhaps an added immunity, or battling other parasites. And especially not weakening or even killing the host. So in this case, you mention though people use these movies, etc. for free, they actually BENEFIT the "host" through a kickback of "marketing"....

So that's the thing. In nature, parasitism works in the big picture, but it is ultimately unsustainable as far as INDIVIDUALs go (the parasite is shit out, or the host weakens and ultimately, slowly dies). What is needed is more in the direction of mutualism (symbiosis) where, as Bob Seger sang, "I was using her, she was using me, but neither one of cared...we were getting our share..."

Another thought, especially for occult writers. Piggybacking helps. Let's say you write a book. Besides the visible material that can be read, there is nothing that prevents you from piggybacking with something unseen, ala Trojan Horse. I'm not just talking about putting curses etc. to be applied to anyone who pirates, but more interestingly, what can you get from those who pirate... a send me extra money sigil that is invisible on the cover, or inside the pages, not necessarily even seen. People do that all the time on used books, which is one reason I shy away from them. Or less selfishly, hidden aspects that get the reader to do things helpful to society, like grow your own food, help another person in some way, etc. that can also benefit the author through the play-it-forward reaction ripple effect :-)

Note: I say that Napster made P2P sharing of ebooks possible... I suddenly recalled last night after watching Dr. Who that such was not the case. I actually combined several "Napster-based programs" (Kazaa, Morpheus, etc) in my head. My apologies to anyone I confused. I'm pretty sure, in retrospect, that Napster was just for music. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Lance: You are one sneaky... Anthropologist, right? LOL. Man... Lemme think before I respond. Wouldn't want people dripping venom over some comment of mine.

Morgan: Yes. Precisely. You can't magically make the technology go away now... So we have to consider it.

@Morgan: That's the trick; getting piracy to work for you. From personal experience, and from what I see happening with others, piracy actually assists those who write/publish quality material. I don't want to read an electronic book on my computer. It is far too cumbersome, hurts my eyes, and usually a migraine begins.

I'd much prefer that quality book be in my hands as a standard paper book for a variety of reasons. Piracy is only one way of checking out the book to see if it is worth purchasing in hardback or paperback to keep. Further, I can't write my own notes in the margin of e-books on my computer; though to be fair, those I've purchased for my Kindle have the ability for me to make notes. However, it is still not at all convenient to look at those notes on any e-book format.

Like cassette tapes, VHS, and CD's; downloads and links to books on the internet isn't going to stop. And as Courts have ruled, much of the file sharing which is occurring falls under "Fair Use" so long as nothing is used for commercial purposes.